I think a big part of it has to do with tone. The early show had a more cartoonish tone, and events didn’t carry much weight. In “Swarm of the Century”, the entire town is destroyed and it’s mostly played for laughs. In “Feeling Pinkie Keen”, Twilight is crushed by a bunch of falling objects, and is fine in the next scene. In “Dragonshy”, Rainbow pulls a Leroy Jenkins, and doesn’t face any consequences for it. But there’s also the opposite end of the spectrum: “Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep”, which is all about Luna’s guilt; she’s constantly apologizing for dragging others into her mess (and Goddamn, I’d forgotten just how good that episode was).
The other thing was that the setting just wasn’t very robust. Most of the characters didn’t have lives that were defined enough to impact. The villains couldn’t really do anything with lasting consequences; Equestria was just too inert to really hurt (at least, not without breaking the show). Plus, most of the time everything just went back to normal after the threat was dealt with. So because of the tone and the way the show was structured, we weren’t given anything concrete to care about when it came to the victims.
Which brings me to Tempest. I’ll point out that Twilight broke down crying when she thought she’d blown her chance to save Equestria. Then she was captured by Tempest, and said something that got under Tempest’s skin. Tempest’s story caused her to realize that she’d become exactly like the ponies who abandoned Tempest.
Just as a side note, it’s kind of interesting that by the time The Movie rolled around, Twilight had watched Equestria go back to normal like nothing happened a whopping eight times. But Tempest is one of the few characters Twilight has encountered whose life had been permanently changed by a traumatic event. Tempest is a villain, but she’s also a victim.
As far as “concern for the victim”, I think G5 is knocking it out of the park with Misty. Because my God do I ever want to see Misty rescued from her situation.
@Just Wayne
Given that I was in the fandom during the initial explosion and had overhyped the show, I feel the need to be a little harder on G4 to balance things out. Whenever I have an opinion on G5, I try to preface it with how I feel about G4. For example, I think two out of every thirteen episodes of G4 fell into the “legitimately great” tier.
@Megalobronia
Is it fair to criticize the early staff for a lack of long-term planning when nobody expected it to last as long as it did? Probably not.
But the show still suffered for it. It is what it is.